0. FOREWORD

TWELVE years had passed since I had laid the body of my
great-uncle, Captain John Carter, of Virginia, away from
the sight of men in that strange mausoleum in the old
cemetery at Richmond.

Often had I pondered on the odd instructions he had left me
governing the construction of his mighty tomb, and especially
those parts which directed that he be laid in an OPEN casket
and that the ponderous mechanism which controlled the bolts
of the vault's huge door be accessible ONLY FROM THE INSIDE.

Twelve years had passed since I had read the remarkable
manuscript of this remarkable man; this man who remembered
no childhood and who could not even offer a vague guess as
to his age; who was always young and yet who had dandled my
grandfather's great-grandfather upon his knee; this man who
had spent ten years upon the planet Mars; who had fought for
the green men of Barsoom and fought against them; who had
fought for and against the red men and who had won the ever
beautiful Dejah Thoris, Princess of Helium, for his wife, and
for nearly ten years had been a prince of the house of Tardos
Mors, Jeddak of Helium.

Twelve years had passed since his body had been found upon
the bluff before his cottage overlooking the Hudson, and oft-
times during these long years I had wondered if John Carter
were really dead, or if he again roamed the dead sea bottoms
of that dying planet; if he had returned to Barsoom to find that
he had opened the frowning portals of the mighty atmosphere plant in
time to save the countless millions who were dying of asphyxiation
on that far-gone day that had seen him hurtled ruthlessly through
forty-eight million miles of space back to Earth once more.
I had wondered if he had found his black-haired Princess and the
slender son he had dreamed was with her in the royal gardens of
Tardos Mors, awaiting his return.

Or, had he found that he had been too late, and thus gone back to a
living death upon a dead world? Or was he really dead after all,
never to return either to his mother Earth or his beloved Mars?